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RE: RDF Interpretation of XML documents (was Re: [xml-d

• To: 'Tim Bray' <tbray@t...>, "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>, 'John Cowan' <jcowan@r...>
• Subject: RE: RDF Interpretation of XML documents (was Re: [xml-d
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 13:37:01 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...

But this is still cool.  Tools that could provide 
assistance to striping the RDF into the XML open 
up a lot of content to the SemWeb processors without 
asking producers to spend a lot of effort understanding 
RDF.   The result seems obvious; predicate logic 
engines can do their voodoo on not-so-arbitrary XML 
with just a little cooperation from the producers.

That seems like a win to me, and a less is more 
approach.  Am I missing something here?

BTW:  other lists take up the issues of shortcomings 
with the use of predicate logic for knowledge representation. 
I don't want to do that here.  I am only noting that 
for efforts that want to work with say, XML Schema or 
DTDs, this looks like a way to have one's cake and 
eat it too. 

I realize this is obvious, but is this right?
In DTD or schema design, one is often taking 
terms of a community of understanding (their argot) 
and using these as markup GI and attribute names. 
This is how one makes XML, human-friendly, not by 
making it friendly to any human anywhere anytime, but 
by making it friendly to a group of humans at sometime 
and someplace.  Content tagging is not making it 
semantically neutral to people and machines, but 
making it semantically specific to those that 
subscribe to that semantic by that label.  We 
know the problems of doing that (WAI, etc.). 

RDFing the file is just a way to get the gold 
out of the vault without breaking down the 
tomb walls.  It leaves a path for visitors 
to enter, comment, and make assertions, but 
leave the hieroglyphs as found.   Lifecyle 
wise, that seems smart.

len

From: Tim Bray [mailto:tbray@t...]

RDF and XML *are* different planets.  RDF is a general-purpose 
knowledge-representation framework that can be serialized in XML; but 
its relationship to XML is not any tighter than any other custom 
vocabulary aimed at any other particular problem space. -Tim

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